Code/Word/Play where coding meets poetry is happening at Church Street Social Bangalore. Coding or programming in India has been growing by leaps and bounds over the years and Bengaluru is a city leading this advance, rightly called the IT capital of India. With the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence, most text on the internet is processed and understood through technology, whether it is for a search engine, for image recognition, to translate text, so on and so forth.

While most coding is applied to build for functional ends. In this activity, Code/Word/Play, we explore the aesthetic and artistic aspects of coding. Participants will be exposed to various examples of coders creating or analyzing pieces of literature, and then encouraged to build some of their own.

About the event: We will begin with a conversation around language and try to understand if coding and writing poetry have anything in common at all. Can a coder borrow from literary or poetic sources when composing code? Is it possible to generate poetry using algorithms? What lies between the rules of verse and randomness? These are some of the questions we will attempt to answer this Saturday afternoon at code/ word/ play. We will also showcase works such as Edward Lear’s Nonsense Verse and E-Poetry, which is a database of code generated poetry, to name a few.

Participants will then engage in a range of exercises to design code that composes poetry, to see if a computer code can understand similes and metaphors, to analyze how a computer views syllables and meter, and what is the manner in which code-based beings learn from the natural human language. Haikus and Bob Dylan’s songs are just some of the works we will play with at this first of a kind gathering in Bangalore.